Between imperialism and Islamism

Good article from Himal Southasian and ZNet:

Between Imperialism and Islamism
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Himal Southasian
September 28, 2007

Between the xenophobes of the West and the illogical fundamentalism in Muslim societies, the choices keep getting grimmer. A mutually beneficial disentanglement can only be provided by humane, reasoned and principled leftwing politics.

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Many of us in the left, particularly in Southasia, have chosen to understand the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism as a response to poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption, loss of faith in the political system, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. As partial truths, these are indisputable. Those condemned to living a life with little hope and happiness are indeed vulnerable to calls from religious demagogues who offer a happy hereafter in exchange for unquestioning obedience.

American imperialism is also held responsible. This, too, is a partial truth. Stung by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States lashed out against Muslims almost everywhere. America’s neoconservatives thought that cracking the whip would surely bring the world to order. Instead, the opposite happened. Islamists won massively in Iraq after a war waged on fraudulent grounds by a superpower filled with hubris, arrogance and ignorance. ‘Shock and Awe’ is now turning into ‘Cut and Run’. The US is leaving behind a snake pit, from which battle-hardened terrorists are stealthily making their way to countries around the world. Polls show that the US has become one of the most unpopular countries in the world, and that, in many places, George W Bush is more disliked than Osama bin Laden. Most Muslims see an oil-greedy America, in collusion with Israel, as a crusader force occupying a historic centre of Islamic civilisation. Al- Qaeda rejoices. Its mission was to convince Muslims that the war was between Islam and unbelief. Today it brags: We told you so!

But like poverty and deprivation, imperialism and colonialism alone did not create violent Islamism.

Consciousness is not simply a consequence of material conditions; less tangible, psychologically rooted factors can be very important, as well. It is a palpable truth that the most dangerous religious radicalism comes from a deliberate and systematic conditioning of minds that is frenetically propagated by ideologues in mosques, madrassas and over the Internet. They have created a climate wherein external causes are automatically held responsible for any and all ills afflicting Muslim society. Shaky Muslim governments, as well as community leaders in places where Muslims are in a minority, have also successfully learned to generate an anger that steers attention away from local issues towards distant enemies, both real and imagined.

Islamic radicalism is bad news for Muslims. It pits Muslims against Muslims, as well as against the world at large. At the same time, it is only peripherally directed against the excesses of corrupt ruling establishments, or inspired by issues of justice and equity. The primary targets of Islamist violence today are other Muslims living in Muslim countries. Some fanatics terrorise and kill other Muslims who belong to the wrong sect. Others accuse “modernised Muslims” as of being vectors of hellish sinfulness – what is known as jahiliya – deserving the full wrath of God. The greatest ire among the orthodox is aroused by the simplest of things, such as women being allowed to walk around bare-faced, or the very notion that they could be considered the equal of men.

Contrary to its claims, Islamic radicalism is indifferent to the suffering of Muslims. We have not seen a large- scale street demonstration in any Muslim country protesting the ongoing genocide of Muslims in Darfur. The slaughter of Bosnian and Chechnyan Muslims caused only a hiccup in the Muslim world. And, for all the rhetoric against the West, the American aggression on Iraq did not result in mass demonstrations by Islamic parties in any Muslim country.

On the other hand, fundamentalist fury explodes when the Faith is seen to be maligned. For example, mobs set afire embassies and buildings around the world for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark; others violently protested the knighthood of Salman Rushdie. Even as Muslim populations become more orthodox, there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world. This suggests that fellow Muslims do not matter any more – only the Faith does.

Islamic radicalism now knows no borders. In searching for solutions to an exploding problem, we must realise that the speed of communication makes it meaningless to regard problems in different parts of the Muslim world as solvable in isolation. Rising Islamism in one country cannot be wholly attributed to the government policies of that country (although that government may well bear considerable responsibility). Nevertheless, let us take a quick look at the Southasian region, before turning back to the global problem. Islamic radicalism has achieved an overwhelming presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is also rapidly changing the texture of society in Bangladesh, and is worsening relations between the minority Muslim population in India and the Hindu majority.

Blowback in Pakistan

Pakistan is in the grip of a full-scale Islamist insurgency. Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Islamabad government has lost administrative authority in most areas bordering Afghanistan. The Taliban have asserted full administrative control in many tribal areas, forcing local government functionaries to flee. Taliban representatives are now the law. A widely available Taliban-made video shows the bodies of common criminals and bandits dangling from electricity poles in the town of Miranshah, the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan, while thousands of appreciative spectators look on. Girls’ schools have been closed, and barbers have been handed six-foot-long death shrouds – shave and die. Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled. Taliban vigilante groups enforcing the sharia patrol the streets of tribal towns, checking, among other things, the length of beards, whether the shalwars are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles, and the attendance of individuals in the mosques.

A new breed of young militants, trained in the madrassas, now calls the shots in many places in Pakistan. They have displaced the leadership of the traditional village elders, the maliks. In August 2007, a “peace jirga” of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan was held in Kabul, attended by Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. It was a failure. Many influential maliks were afraid to come to the gathering, in spite of being offered protection by both governments (see Himal September 2007, “No jirga like a peace jirga”).

Sectarian clashes in Pakistani tribal areas are rife, fuelled by fiery mullahs operating private FM radio stations, broadcasting incendiary programmes targeting rival mullahs and the ‘immorality’ of modern culture. In April 2007, mortars and rockets were freely used by both Sunnis and Shias in Parachinar and Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP. In villages of Hangu District, in the tribal areas, both sides have exchanged light artillery and rocket fire, oftentimes leaving scores dead. In May 2007, fierce armed battles broke out between the Ansar-ul-Islam and Lashkar-e-Islam groups in Bara in the NWFP, while Tank and Mingora saw bloody clashes with the Frontier Constabulary.

The Talibanisation of Pakistan’s tribal areas has caused alarm, but the six-month-long standoff with the local Taliban of Islamabad’s central mosque, the Lal Masjid, was stunningly novel. Islamic vigilante squads roamed the city burning CD stores, kidnapping alleged prostitutes, and enforcing their own version of morality. This would have continued for even longer but for an incident in July that drew the ire of the Chinese government, after Chinese citizens were kidnapped from a Chinese-run brothel in Islamabad. The Pakistan Army finally launched a bloody assault that left at least 117 dead and hundreds more injured. This episode showed that various militant organisations, including Jaish-e-Muhammad (which had pioneered suicide bombings in Kashmir) could easily establish themselves in the city, with the super-vigilant Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and other military organisations choosing to look the other way.

Under US pressure, the Pakistan Army has mounted military offensives against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in recent months, but the resistance has stiffened. Pakistani soldiers are now refusing to fight. On 1 September, an entire military convoy surrendered to militants in Waziristan without firing a single shot. Three hundred Pakistani soldiers were taken hostage. But what shook the establishment was the subsequent suicide attack in Rawalpindi, on a bus carrying ISI employees on their way to work. More than 25 were killed. Since the bus was unmarked, this was clearly an inside job, suggesting that tribal militants and the Taliban have infiltrated deep into the military establishment. Not surprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in fears in the West. According to the August 2007 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, 35 percent of US foreign- policy experts believe that Pakistan is most likely to become the next al-Qaeda stronghold; 22 percent say that Pakistan is an ally that least serves America’s national-security interests.

The rest of the neighbourhood

Afghanistan is in a still more desperate state than its neighbour, with Hamid Karzai’s government controlling little more than Kabul. Poppy cultivation is up; girls’ education is down. As in the Pakistani frontier, the Taliban have risen from the ashes after being routed by the American action following 9/11. They could have – and should have – been defeated by a correct mixture of military force, political strategising and speedy economic reconstruction of devastated areas. Instead, Washington, DC’s myopic emphasis on military solutions has led to the Taliban’s revival and subsequent spill-over into Pakistan’s tribal areas. While Afghans do not want a return to the brutality of the Taliban regime, the wholesale corruption and participation of war criminals in the Karzai government has robbed it of credibility.

Bangladesh, which owes its birth to linguistic rather than religious nationalism, is nowhere close to Pakistan or Afghanistan in terms of militant influence. Nevertheless, there is a rapid transformation in progress. Many militant incidents, including bomb blasts, have occurred over the course of the past year. Reflecting broader changes within Bangladeshi society, mainstream politics has also transformed. In 1971, few would have thought that the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had openly sided with the West Pakistani army, could ever re-establish itself in Bangladeshi politics. But the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the last ruling party, had a number of senior leaders with close ideological affinity to the Jamaat. In villages, activists are imposing veils on women and forcing men to grow beards; secular intellectuals and leftwing activists have been murdered; Ahmadis are being persecuted; and what remains of the Hindu minority is being made increasingly uncomfortable.

India, whose democratic traditions have long provided a safety valve, had seen far less Muslim militancy than Pakistan, except in Jammu & Kashmir. But in 1992, a mob of Hindu zealots tore down the Babri Masjid, challenging India’s claim to being a secularist and pluralist democracy. This set into motion a cycle of reaction and counter-reaction that has yet to play itself out. A state-assisted slaughter in 2002, which left almost 2000 Muslims dead in Gujarat, has been the most tragic consequence so far. Unlike in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Muslims in India are primarily the victims, and not the perpetrators, of violence. Most are poor and uneducated, while the community itself lost most of its capable individuals as migrants to Pakistan during Partition. While Muslim conservatism in India has increased visibly over the past decade, a growing Muslim middle class, and alternatives to the mosque as a venue for socialising, have made India relatively peaceful. However, as the July 2006 Bombay train bombings and this August’s explosions in Hyderabad illustrated, extremist violence is on the rise, with the techniques used by the extremists similar to those used by al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants.

What America must do

Southasia is not alone in facing violent Islamic militancy, of course. Faced with internal failure, manifest decline from a peak of greatness many centuries ago, and afflicted by cultural dislocation in the age of globalisation, many Muslim societies have turned inwards. From the early 1950s, following the era of decolonisation, a sense of grievance and frustration had produced a multitude of Islamist movements spreading from Algeria to Indonesia. But they were inconsequential. Had the US not cultivated them as allies against communism during the Cold War, history could have been very different.

Looking back to the middle of the 20th century, one cannot see a single Muslim nationalist leader who was a fundamentalist. Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq – all sought to organise their societies on the basis of secular values. However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later that of the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the Cold War pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left more than half a million dead.

Things came to a head with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The American strategy for defeating the ‘Evil Empire’ required marshalling the forces of Islam from every part of the world. With General Zia ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, and Saudi Arabia as the principal source of funds, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen. It worked. In 1988, Soviet troops withdrew unconditionally, and the US-Pakistan-Saudi-Egypt alliance emerged victorious. A chapter of history seemed complete. But appearances were illusory, and events over the next two decades were to reveal the true costs of this victory. Even in the mid 1990s – long before the 9/11 attack on the US – it was clear that the victorious alliance had unwittingly created a genie suddenly beyond its control.

All this is history – and unchangeable. Today, relations between Islam and the West, particularly as represented by the US, are worse than ever before. A civilisational clash may not be here yet, but it could be around the corner. How can it be avoided? Imagine for a moment that the US had a sudden change of heart, realised the error of its ways, and wanted to bury the hatchet with Muslims. How could the US atone for its past? Here are ten key elements.

First, as demanded by both Muslims and non- Muslims across the globe, the US needs an attitudinal change. It must repudiate grand imperial designs as well as its claim to being an exception among nations. The notion of total planetary control had guided the Republican administration even before the attacks of 11 September 2001. The Democrats, meanwhile, many of whom have now publicly turned against the Iraq war, limit their criticisms to the strategy and conduct of the war, the lies and disinformation dispensed by the White House, suspicious deals with defence contractors, and the like. But they share with Republicans the belief that the US possesses the right – and adequate might – to mould the world according to its wishes. The people of the US must somehow convince themselves of the need to obey international laws and etiquettes, and that they do not have some divine mission to fulfil. In the post-Tony Blair period, Britain must also seek a foreign policy independent of the United States, and cultivate independent relations with Muslim countries.

Second, the creation of a Palestinian state must not be further postponed. The dispossession of Palestinians has been appropriated as a Muslim cause with huge symbolic significance. Peace between Islam and the West is impossible without some reasonable resolution of this problem. The US has given Israel carte blanche for military action against the Palestinians, as in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. American officials remain silent about the future of occupied territories. The fact that Hamas and Fatah are at each other’s throats does not mean that the Palestinian problem has gone away. On the contrary, it strengthens extremism and makes everything more difficult. Without a Palestinian state, the Palestinian problem will mutate into a new and still less controllable form.

Third, the US must take seriously the impact of collateral damage on civilian populations. The heavy use of airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan inevitably led to large numbers of non-combatant casualties. Often the ‘coalition forces’ refuse to acknowledge civilian deaths; when confronted with incontrovertible evidence, they apologise and issue miserably small compensation. Karl Inderfurth, Assistant Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, recently admitted that “military actions [in Afghanistan] … by US and NATO forces will speak louder than those sincerely expressed words. As the death toll of civilians mounts, Afghan hearts and minds are being lost and, with that, the spectre of losing the war looms.” Very sensibly, the goal of “zero innocent civilian casualties” was recommended a year ago by retired General Barry McCaffrey after a trip to Afghanistan.

Fourth, the US must stop threatening Iran with a nuclear holocaust for trying to develop nuclear weapons, while rewarding, to various degrees, other countries – Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea – that have developed such weapons surreptitiously. The Sunday Times in London reports: “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.” It would, of course, be highly preferable if Iran could be dissuaded by peaceful means, including sanctions, from making a bomb. But there is no strong moral argument available to the US against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, given both its own nuclear stance and the fact that Iran’s initial nuclear capability was provided by the US during the Shah’s rule. The US refuses to work through the United Nations, or to support a nuclear-weapons free zone in West Asia. So far, the US has refused even to hold direct talks with the Iranian leadership to defuse the nuclear crisis. Overtures by Iran, such as were made by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his letter to President Bush in 2006, were rejected. But North Korea’s nuclear test showed that US refusals to hold one-on-one talks have failed miserably. On the other hand, nuclear negotiations in exchange for oil have partially succeeded in halting North Korean nuclear developments.

Fifth, the US must not exploit the Sunni-Shia schism in the hope of weakening both. Clever as this might seem, using religious passions to achieve political ends is dangerous. Moreover, created monsters have a habit of turning against their masters – some notable examples include the CIA’s Afghan jihad, Israel’s experiment with Hamas, Pakistan’s with jihadist groups, and India’s with Sikh extremists. For US strategists, exploiting sectarianism is a hard temptation to resist: al-Qaeda and parts of the Sunni community in Iraq and Lebanon see Iran and Hizbollah as an even greater threat than the US occupation. They would welcome a US attack on Iran, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, and might even provoke a confrontation to encourage the US to do so.

Sixth, the US must not support dictators and quislings like General Musharraf and Hosni Mubarak while preaching the virtues of democracy. This breeds anger and resentment, and is especially dangerous given that US hypocrisy is so transparent.

Seventh, the West must seize opportunities that project it as generous, rather than aggressive. Providing disaster relief (including following the 2004 Tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake) did much to build a positive image. Soft power is critical. Draining the swamps where extremism breeds will require increasing foreign aid to poor Muslim countries, creating economic and employment opportunities there, and desisting from policies that reward only the elites of the recipient societies.

Eighth, the US must accept the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have become worldwide symbols of arbitrary torture and imprisonment. They demonstrate that, in dealing with suspected ‘terrorists’, the US has suspended subservience to the rule of law. In doing so, it does only marginally better than the real militants it seeks to combat. Nor should the US outsource the use of torture to repressive regimes like Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. This too can only backfire. For dealing with terrorism suspects, judicial mechanisms based on defendable principles, rather than expediency, must be developed.

Ninth, soldiers and officials must be prevented from desecrating Islamic holy symbols. Numerous such incidents are known to have taken place, exemplified by the flushing of a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo. Fortunately the US military has officially recognised that this is extremely dangerous, due to the boost it provides to extremists. Of course, violation of rules in combat situations may be difficult to prevent. The award of knighthood to Salman Rushdie is another example of unwise provocation: it may or may not be justified on grounds of literary merit, but it instantly kindled Muslim anger.

Tenth, and finally, discriminating against Muslims living within Western societies is both morally wrong, and will only invite further radicalisation. One sees that Christians, Jews and Hindus are able to freely run private educational institutions in the US, but Muslim schools are viewed with much suspicion. A secular society must have no preferences between religions. Any perceived deviation from this is sufficient to convey to a minority group that it is an object of persecution. Indeed, paranoia is easily detectable in the US Muslim community. Education in the West must therefore be secular in word and spirit, and all schools should be open to all faiths. In other words, no religious schools should be permitted. Unfortunately there is little chance of this at the moment, as US politics have become increasingly captive to the politics of born-again Christians who see the world through a biblical prism. The UK, too, needs to secularise itself, perhaps on the French model. Its multiculturalism is not working. Like Turkey, it should ban the veil in government buildings.

What Muslims must do

There is little justice to be found in history. Nevertheless, sometimes nemesis doggedly pursues the past. Muslim states that had pushed the Islamist agenda are today besieged by the forces they helped to create.

Pakistan is the prime example. Twenty-five years ago, under a military regime, prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast during Ramadan, beards were encouraged, selections for academic posts required that the candidate demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and jihad was propagated through schoolbooks. But the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal, and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Since 2001, it has lost over a thousand men fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Slogans once common at army recruiting centres (for instance, Jihad for Allah) are now in the trash can, and bearded officers are losing out in promotions.

The rise of Islamic militancy in Pakistan owes much to the cowardly deference of Pakistani political leaders to mullah blackmail. Their instinctive response has been to seek appeasement. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suddenly turned Islamic in his final days, as he made a desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to save his government by banning alcohol, declaring Friday a holiday, and proclaiming Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Benazir Bhutto, fearing mullah backlash, made no attempt to challenge the horrific antiwoman Hudood and blasphemy laws during her premierships. And Mian Nawaz Sharif went a step further, by attempting to turn Pakistan into a Saudi Arabia by instituting sharia laws.

In Bangladesh, the Jamaat-i-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote have been coalition partners of the BNP, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s party. During Khaleda Zia’s third term, there was a rise in attacks on Ahmadis and Hindus, a ban on Ahmadi publications, and a rise in religious militancy in general. During her times in office, Khaleda Zia used her fundamentalist allies as weapons against Sheikh Hasina Wajed, her bitter political and personal rival. Both leaders bicker and accuse the other of encouraging terrorism, while refusing to face up to their own responsibilities. In all of this, the Jamaat has been the winner, having set up thousands of madrassas, thus giving a significant impetus for training jihadist fighters who can fight causes around the world.

But blaming individual states and political leaders does not make for a satisfactory explanation of the huge rise in global Islamic militancy. One must seek reasons at a broader level. It is a sad truth that Muslims have little presence in today’s world affairs, in science or in culture. This has led to diminished self-esteem, as well as increasing recourse to political Islam. Some dream of a new global caliphate. But the premises of this politics are false. Each blow inflicted by America after 9/11 has led Islamists to predict that the pain and humiliation will force all Muslims to close ranks, forget old grudges, purge traitors and renegades from their ranks, and generate a collective rage great enough to take on the power of today’s governing civilisation. Each time, they have been dead wrong.

So what do Muslims need to do? A paradigm shift is essential. Muslims must realise that the awesome strength of Western civilisation – which also made possible its predatory imperialism – springs from accepting the premises of science and logic, respecting democratic institutions (at least within national borders), allowing value systems to evolve, and boldly challenging dogma without being condemned for blasphemy. They must connect the West’s success with personal freedom and liberty, superior work ethics, artistic and scientific creativity, and the compulsive urge to innovate and experiment.

Muslims, if they are to be a part of mainstream civilisation, will have to adapt to a new universal cultural climate, one that accepts human rights as defined by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the equality of men and women. On the part of Muslim minorities and immigrants to non-Muslim countries, this means acceptance of different behavioural norms, and a move away from the current tendency of ghettoisation and towards greater integration into the larger society.

Meanwhile, Muslims themselves must stop believing convoluted conspiracy theories that purport to explain their states of weakness. For example, it is widely held that today’s sectarian warfare is a consequence of some cunningly remote manipulations by enemies of Islam. But in fact, the Shia-Sunni schism, and the first related bloodbath, followed almost immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammad.

Muslims must also stop dreaming of theocracy and sharia law as solutions to their predicaments. This means acknowledging the sovereignty of the people rather than the rule of Allah, the latter by way of a self-appointed priesthood, such as vilayat-e-faqih and khilafat-e-arz. These are essentially prescriptions for a theocracy run by mullahs. It is simply impossible to run modern states while remaining shackled to medieval religious laws. Economic development, an expansion of individual liberties, democracy, an explosive growth in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities – these and a host of other benefits will forever remain distant dreams without the modernisation of thought. The only way by which Muslim societies can become democratic, pluralistic and free from violent extremism is by going through their own internal struggles. Indigenous reform is difficult but possible. Islam is certainly as immutable as the Koran, but values held by Muslims have changed over the centuries.

The role of the left

Looking down at planet Earth from above, one would see a bloody battlefield, where imperial might and religious fundamentalism are locked in bitter struggle. Whose victory or defeat should one wish for? There cannot be an unequivocal preference; each dispute must be looked at separately. And the answers seem to lie on the left of the political spectrum, as long as we are able to recognise what the left actually stands for.

The leftwing agenda is a positive one. It rests upon hope for a happier and more humane world that is grounded in reason, education and economic justice. It provides a sound moral compass to a world that is losing direction. One must navigate a course safely away from the xenophobes of the US and Europe – who see Islam as an evil to be suppressed or conquered – and also away from the large number of Muslims across the world who justify acts of terrorism and violence as part of asymmetric warfare. No ‘higher authority’ defines the leftwing agenda, and no covenant of belief defines a ‘leftist’. There is no card to be carried or oath to be taken. But secularism, universalistic ideas of human rights, and freedom of belief are non-negotiable. Domination by reasons of class, race, national origin, gender or sexual orientation are all equally unacceptable. In practical terms, this means that the left defends workers from capitalists, peasants from landlords, the colonised from the colonisers, religious minorities from state persecution, the dispossessed from the occupiers, women from male oppression, Muslims from Western Islamophobes, populations of Western countries from terrorists, and so on.

Mobilisation on the left is urgently needed at a time when extremists on both sides of the present divide have moved to centre stage. Even after the end of George W Bush’s presidency, the Americans are bound to continue bombing Muslim lands. They think they can win. But their power, though large, is limited. Iraq has proven the point. On the other side, Islamist groups will continue to recruit successfully, so long as a large number of Muslims feel that they are being unfairly targeted, and that justice has ceased to matter in world affairs. America cannot win. Nor can the Islamists. It is for the left to bring sanity to the world, by rising above imperialism, xenophobia, cultural determinism and religious extremism, and drawing the attention of the people back onto their real problems.

Himal Southasian | October-November 2007

Sign of the times

Today I saw this Target ad, which reminds me of all the instructional films about "duck and cover" during the Cold War.


Here's the Target Family Safety Planning Guide the ad links to:


Here are some old "civil defense" propaganda posters for comparison:

FBI terrorist watch list swells to over 500,000 names

From ABC News:

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified.

A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names," which is utilized by its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.

Words in a time of war: American empire, the Age of Rhetoric, and the reality-based community

Tom Dispatch carries the commencement address for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, which Cursor describes as "chronicl[ing] the 'Age of Rhetoric' ushered in by the Bush administration's conviction that 'power can remake reality'."

Words in a Time of War
Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President
By Mark Danner

[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]

When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I'm afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety -- the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.

Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world -- and I use "get on in the world" in the very broadest sense -- well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.

Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed…. intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war -- and what a very strange wartime it has been.

When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq War had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the President, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked "Mission Accomplished," had declared: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today -- "Words in a Time of War" -- surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era's most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the President uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The President has lost control of those words, as of so much else.

At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003 fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier -- a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience -- the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory -- the first being the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Baghdad, also staged -- an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The President was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.

However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl's famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a "disciplined grasp" of the "symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse" -- as your Rhetoric Department's website puts it -- surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical -- unprecedentedly so -- in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.

I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial "unnamed Administration official" and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind's recounting, is what that "unnamed Administration official" told him:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante's welcome above the gates of Hell, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from "Bush's Brain" -- for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname -- these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based community" -- those such as we -- are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" -- in quotation marks -- for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?

Of course I should not say "those such as we" here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades -- though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the "reality-based community" may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.

The Dirtied Face of Power

I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of -- I hope -- permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters -- for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival -- but by the votes of Supreme Court Justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.

In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the President shortly achieved this first success in "creating his own reality." To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.

This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: Nineteen young men with box cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day -- often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don't even make the front pages of our papers -- it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.

The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box cutters in the hands of nineteen young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking -- the propaganda of the deed, indeed -- then that day the television was the indispensable conveyer of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America's weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror -- as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs -- terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about "dirtying the face of power."

President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic "over-determined" decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to "remake the Middle East"; and of realpolitik, in the form of the "vital interest" of securing the industrial world's oil supplies.

In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation's leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation's prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the President, when asked by Bush's speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq War, responded: "Because Afghanistan was not enough." The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror -- the burning towers collapsing on the television screen -- had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first "war cabinet" meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the "lack of targets" in Afghanistan and wondered whether we "shouldn't do Iraq first." He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.

In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs, improvised explosive devices, worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare "uni-polar moment." It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy, and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.

It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush's Brain and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak": international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and.... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts -- indeed, law itself -- can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.

Asymmetric Warfare and Dumb Luck

Now, here's an astonishing fact: Fewer than half a dozen years into this "uni-polar moment," the greatest military power in the history of the world stands on the brink of defeat in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and all-powerful military has been humbled by a congeries of secret organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide vests, car bombs and improvised explosive devices -- all of them cheap, simple, and effective, indeed so effective that these techniques now comprise a kind of ready-made insurgency kit freely available on the Internet and spreading in popularity around the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that land of few targets.

As I stand here, one of our two major political parties advocates the withdrawal -- gradual, or otherwise -- of American combat forces from Iraq and many in the other party are feeling the increasing urge to go along. As for the Bush administration's broader War on Terror, as the State Department detailed recently in its annual report on the subject, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher, nor more effective. True, al-Qaeda has not attacked again within the United States. They do not need to. They are alive and flourishing. Indeed, it might even be said that they are winning. For their goal, despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration, was not simply to kill Americans but, by challenging the United States in this spectacular fashion, to recruit great numbers to their cause and to move their insurgency into the heart of the Middle East. And all these things they have done.

How could such a thing have happened? In their choice of enemy, one might say that the terrorists of al-Qaeda had a great deal of dumb luck, for they attacked a country run by an administration that had a radical conception of the potency of power. At the heart of the principle of asymmetric warfare -- al-Qaeda's kind of warfare -- is the notion of using your opponents' power against him. How does a small group of insurgents without an army, or even heavy weapons, defeat the greatest conventional military force the world has ever known? How do you defeat such an army if you don't have an army? Well, you borrow your enemy's. And this is precisely what al-Qaeda did. Using the classic strategy of provocation, the group tried to tempt the superpower into its adopted homeland. The original strategy behind the 9/11 attacks -- apart from humbling the superpower and creating the greatest recruiting poster the world had ever seen -- was to lure the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower (like the Soviet Union before it) was to be trapped, stranded, and destroyed. It was to prepare for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the assassination, two days before 9/11 -- via bombs secreted in the video cameras of two terrorists posing as reporters -- of the Afghan Northern Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, who would have been the United States' most powerful ally.

Well aware of the Soviets' Afghanistan debacle -- after all, the U.S. had supplied most of the weapons that defeated the Soviets there -- the Bush administration tried to avoid a quagmire by sending plenty of air support, lots of cash, and, most important, very few troops, relying instead on its Afghan allies. But if bin Laden was disappointed in this, he would soon have a far more valuable gift: the invasion of Iraq, a country that, unlike Afghanistan, was at the heart of the Middle East and central to Arab concerns, and, what's more, a nation that sat squarely on the critical Sunni-Shia divide, a potential ignition switch for al-Qaeda's great dream of a regional civil war. It is on that precipice that we find ourselves teetering today.

Critical to this strange and unlikely history were the administration's peculiar ideas about power and its relation to reality -- and beneath that a familiar imperial attitude, if put forward in a strikingly crude and harsh form: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality." Power, untrammeled by law or custom; power, unlimited by the so-called weapons of the weak, be they international institutions, courts, or terrorism -- power can remake reality. It is no accident that one of Karl Rove's heroes is President William McKinley, who stood at the apex of America's first imperial moment, and led the country into a glorious colonial adventure in the Philippines that was also meant to be the military equivalent of a stroll in the park and that, in the event, led to several years of bloody insurgency -- an insurgency, it bears noticing, that was only finally put down with the help of the extensive use of torture, most notably water-boarding, which has made its reappearance in the imperial battles of our own times.

If we are an empire now, as Mr. Rove says, perhaps we should add, as he might not, that we are also a democracy, and therein, Rhetoric graduates of 2007, lies the rub. A democratic empire, as even the Athenians discovered, is an odd beast, like one of those mythological creatures born equally of lion and bird, or man and horse. If one longs to invade Iraq to restore the empire's prestige, one must convince the democracy's people of the necessity of such a step. Herein lies the pathos of the famous weapons-of-mass-destruction issue, which has become a kind of synecdoche for the entire lying mess of the past few years. The center stage of our public life is now dominated by a simple melodrama: Bush wanted to invade Iraq; Bush told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq did not have such weapons. Therefore Bush lied, and the war was born of lies and deception.

I hesitate to use that most overused of rhetorical terms -- irony -- to describe the emergence of this narrative at the center of our national life, but nonetheless, and with apologies: It is ironic. The fact is that officials of the Bush administration did believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though they vastly exaggerated the evidence they had to prove it and, even more, the threat that those weapons might have posed, had they been there. In doing this, the officials believed themselves to be "framing a guilty man"; that is, like cops planting a bit of evidence in the murderer's car, they believed their underlying case was true; they just needed to dramatize it a bit to make it clear and convincing to the public. What matter, once the tanks were rumbling through Baghdad and the war was won? Weapons would be found, surely; and if only a few were found, who would care? By then, the United States military would have created a new reality.

I have often had a daydream about this. I see a solitary Army private -- a cook perhaps, or a quartermaster -- breaking the padlock on some forgotten warehouse on an Iraqi military base, poking about and finding a few hundred, even a few thousand, old artillery shells, leaking chemicals. These shells -- forgotten, unusable -- might have dated from the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq unquestionably possessed chemical munitions. (Indeed, in the 1980s, the United States had supplied targeting intelligence that helped the Iraqis use them effectively against the Iranians.) And though now they had been forgotten, leaking, unusable, still they would indeed be weapons of mass destruction -- to use the misleading and absurd construction that has headlined our age -- and my solitary cook or quartermaster would be a hero, for he would have, all unwittingly, "proved" the case.

My daydream could easily have come to pass. Why not? It is nigh unto miraculous that the Iraqi regime, even with the help of the United Nations, managed so thoroughly to destroy or remove its once existing stockpile. And if my private had found those leaky old shells what would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of Saddam's threat. So much less embarrassing than the "weapons of mass destruction program related activities" that the administration still doggedly asserts were "discovered." But, in fact, the underlying calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war, the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat Saddam posed to the United States and relentlessly understated the risk the United States would run in invading and occupying Iraq. And it would have remained true and incontestable that -- as the quaintly fact-bound British Foreign Secretary put it eight months before the war, in a secret British cabinet meeting made famous by the so-called Downing Street Memo -- "the case [for attacking Iraq] was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and, satisfying as it has been to see the administration beaten about the head with that prop, we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really been the issue, why could the administration not let the UN inspectors take the time to find them (as, of course, they never would have)? The administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq war. The weapons were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli, what Hitchcock called the Maguffin -- that glowing mysterious object in the suitcase in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: that is, a satisfyingly concrete object on which to fasten a rhetorical or narrative end, in this case a war to restore American prestige, project its power, remake the Middle East.

The famous weapons were chosen to play this leading role for "bureaucratic reasons," as Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense and until quite recently the unhappy president of the World Bank, once remarked to a lucky journalist. Had a handful of those weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam posed nowhere remotely near the threat to the United States that would have justified running the enormous metaphysical risk that a war of choice with Iraq posed. Of course, when you are focused on magical phrases like "preponderant power" and "the uni-polar moment," matters like numbers of troops at your disposal -- and the simple fact that the United States had too few to sustain a long-term occupation of a country the size of Iraq -- must seem mundane indeed.

Imperial Words and the Reality-Based Universe

I must apologize to you, Rhetoric Class of 2007. Ineluctably, uncontrollably, I find myself slipping back into the dull and unimaginative language of the reality-based community. It must grate a bit on your ears. After all, we live in a world in which the presumption that we were misled into war, that the Bush officials knew there were no weapons and touted them anyway, has supplanted the glowing, magical image of the weapons themselves. It is a presumption of great use to those regretful souls who once backed the war so fervently, not least a number of Democratic politicians we all could name, as well as many of my friends in the so-called liberal punditocracy who now need a suitable excuse for their own rashness, gullibility, and stupidity. For this, Bush's mendacity seems perfectly sized and ready to hand.

There is, however, full enough of that mendacity, without artificially adding to the stockpile. Indeed, all around us we've been hearing these last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed -- and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.

If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on Sixty Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth, made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use "extreme interrogation techniques" or -- in the First President of Rhetoric's phrase -- "an alternative set of procedures" on prisoners in the War on Terror.

He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror -- and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in "interrogating terrorists" -- seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these "alternative sets of procedures" explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush's interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a "scandal," a "crisis," it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.

Perhaps the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley is not the worst of places to call for a halt to this spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me forever a member of the reality-based community if I suggest that the one invaluable service the new Democratic Congress can provide all Americans is a clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves in this present time of war: an authorized version, as it were, which is, I know, the most pathetically retrograde of ideas.

This would require that people like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld, and many others be called before a select, bipartisan committee of Congress to tell us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm with embarrassment putting forward such a pathetically unsophisticated notion, but failing at least the minimally authorized version that Congress could provide, we will find ourselves forever striving -- by chasing down byways like the revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame, or the question of whether or not George Tenet bolstered his slam dunk exclamation in the Oval Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like leap -- to understand how precisely decisions were made between September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq eighteen months later.

Don't worry, though, Rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has about it the dusty feel of past decades; it is as "reality-based" as can be and we are unlikely to see it in our time. What we are likely to see is the ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major President, who, with fewer than one American in three now willing to say they approve of the job he is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day. Tempting as it is, I will urge you not to draw too many overarching conclusions from his fate. He has had, after all, a very long run -- and I say this with the wonder that perhaps can only come from having covered both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq War.

I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and grey and I spent a good deal of time drawing black X's through the sources listed in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.

How, in these "words in a time of war," can I convey to you the reality of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear, but -- for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn to read and understand -- this is the most reality I could find to tell you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it is as it is.

"We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over...

"So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I...

"When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. ‘We identified him by the cell phone in his pants' pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don't know what he looks like.'

"…We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and everywhere body parts.

"We were asked what we were looking for; ‘upper half' replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. ‘Over there.' We looked for our boy's broken body between tens of other boys' remains; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.

"Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony."

The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they create their own reality -- that they are, as Bush's Brain put it, "history's actors." The voices you heard come from history's objects and we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.

The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well, perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was scared when he went out on patrol -- this was October 2003, as the insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then saying with evident pity for a reporter's lack of understanding. "This is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot better than we do." He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world, a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.

Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch history together like a lopsided quilt -- all these have no place in the imperial vision. A perception of one's self as "history's actor" leaves no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.

You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all people you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up with you.

Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appear regularly in The New York Review of Books. His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.

Republican candidates push unproven Iraq-911 tie

This Boston Globe article analyzes the claims by Republican presidential candidates, all apparently relying on whipping up fear as their ticket to the White House, that all Muslims are essentially identical anti-American terrorists. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said, “They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.” Senator John McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

GOP Rivals Embrace Unproven Iraq-9/11 Tie
by Peter S. Canellos
Boston Globe
May 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would “follow us home” from Iraq — a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. ”

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States.

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .

Michael Scheuer , the CIA’s former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.

“There are at least 41 groups [worldwide] that have announced their allegiance to Osama bin Laden — and I will bet that none of them are directed by Osama bin Laden,” Scheuer said, pointing out that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not overseen by bin Laden.

Nonetheless, many GOP candidates have recently echoed Bush’s longstanding assertion that Iraq is the “central battlefront” in the worldwide war against Al Qaeda and have declared that Al Qaeda would make Iraq its base of operations if the United States withdraws — notions that Scheuer said do not withstand scrutiny.

“The idea that Al Qaeda will move its headquarters of operation from South Asia to Iraq is nonsense,” said Scheuer.

The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush’s supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks — a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had “strong links” with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.

But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.

Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein’s support for terrorism — which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein’s backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Now, some GOP presidential candidates refer to “the terrorists” as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.

Romney said Friday: “You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We’ve got to make sure that we’re fighting a war on them.”

Romney’s comment in the earlier debate that “they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” struck some former intelligence officials as particularly misleading. Shia and Sunni, they said, are branches of Islam and not terrorist groups. There are an estimated 300 million Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, many of them fighting Al Qaeda.

“Are Shia and Sunni together? Is the Muslim Brotherhood cooperating with all these other groups? No,” said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst.

“There’s a tendency to exaggerate in a debate,” she added. “You push the envelope as far as you can.”

No point has been emphasized more strongly at GOP debates than the link between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. During the debates about war funding, GOP leaders have downplayed the role of sectarian violence in Iraq and emphasized the role of Al Qaeda.

On Friday, McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding, “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

But specialists say that the enemy the military calls “Al Qaeda Iraq” is a combination of Iraqi jihadists and an unknown number of fighters from countries throughout the Middle East. “AQI” came together after the US invasion. And while there is evidence that AQI members coordinate attacks among themselves, there is little evidence that they coordinate closely with bin Laden.

In pressing his case for continued war funding, Bush last week said a previously classified intelligence report indicated that bin Laden had sent a messenger in early 2005 to urge the late Iraqi terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to aim more attacks at the United States.

But there is no further evidence that bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exerts control over Al Qaeda Iraq, according to a senior military official in Baghdad in an interview last week.

“We don’t have any direct information that would link Al Qaeda Iraq to getting e-mails, memos, whatever, from bin Laden,” the military official said, speaking under condition of anonymity.

A McCain spokesman said the senator did not mean to suggest in his debate comments that bin Laden was in Iraq. But aides to Romney and McCain, in interviews, insisted that the candidates are not exaggerating when they speak of bin Laden and the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

“The larger point shouldn’t be in dispute,” said Randy Scheunemann , McCain’s foreign policy adviser. “If there’s a territory where Al Qaeda is left unmolested, free to plan, conduct, and train for operations, they will do so.”

Romney’s national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor’s linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. “I think [Romney’s statement] was much more directed at intent — they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments,” Madden said. “There’s a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region.”

Analysts say that Hamas and Hezbollah are participating in democratic governments and that the leaders of Shi’ite militias are part of the Iraqi government.

“All of the bad actors in the Middle East get mixed up in people’s minds,” said Andrew Kohut , director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, which has polled extensively on views on Iraq. “That’s why it was easy to play on the perception that Saddam Hussein got together with Osama bin Laden and said ‘Let’s fly some planes into buildings.’ Saddam Hussein was seen as a bad guy in the Middle East, and so it all gets jumbled up in people’s thinking.”

Amnesty International decries America's "global web of abuse"

Democracy Now has an interview with the executive director of Amnesty International USA, in which he talks about Amnesty's report of the state of human rights around the world, in which the organization says, “The U.S. administration’s double speak has been breathtakingly shameless. It is unrepentant about the global web of abuse it has spun in the name of counterterrorism.’’

LARRY COX: I think the most serious challenge we have to human rights in practice and to the idea of human rights is unfortunately the open defiance by the United States, not because it’s the worst country in terms of human rights violations, but because its example is so powerful. It is a superpower, and when it openly defies human rights in the way that it has, openly violates the most fundamental human rights and justifies those violations, it spreads around the globe. It has a terrible impact.

AMY GOODMAN: You start with the Military Commissions Act.

LARRY COX: Well, the Military Commissions Act sort of brings together many of these practices: holding people without access to a court, without charging them, without trying them; setting up military commissions that can use evidence that has been obtained through coercion, that no normal court would accept; denying habeas to people, one of the oldest protections and a very important protection against abuse and against torture around the world. These are all practices that historically the United States in recent decades has criticized severely, when other countries have carried it out. Now, we’re doing it.

So where is our moral authority? Where is our credibility, when we go to Egypt, for example, and say, “You should not have military commissions,” when we go to Egypt and say, “You should not be carrying out torture,” when we have, in fact, sent people to Egypt knowing that they would be tortured?

JUAN GONZALEZ: You say in the report that far too many leaders are trampling freedom and trumpeting an ever-widening range of fears, fears of being swamped by migrants, fears of being blown up by terrorists, and fears of rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. What about this issue of fear and its impact on populations not raising questions about any of this?

LARRY COX: Well, this is the central reality of the world we’re now in, where fear, instead of being met -- and there are, of course, legitimate fears that people have -- but instead of meeting those fears with effective ways of dealing with the causes of that fear, fear is being manipulated. Fear is being used, fear is being exaggerated, in order to justify what is, in fact, unjustifiable. You see it around the globe. You see it in China, where, you know, every time someone is arrested now, it’s terrorism. You see it in Russia, where, again, the threat of the conflict in Chechnya is now being used to widely justify restrictions on civil society. This use of fear is one of the most frightening aspects of the world we’re now living in.

AMY GOODMAN: Larry Cox, the Bush administration has been fiercely critical of Amnesty's findings....

LARRY COX: Well, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of attacks. We’ve been getting these kinds of attacks from governments all around the world every time we criticize their human rights violations. We don’t engage in ideology. We engage in facts. Now, we have, unfortunately, a very sad collection of facts about the United States. The United States has openly admitted having secret detention sites, even said it boastfully, and that it will continue to have secret detention sites, where people are kidnapped and taken. No one knows where they are. These are not things that Amnesty International has invented. These are the words of the President of the United States.

We know that if we criticize strongly what a government is doing when a government is doing something wrong, that we’re going to get these kind of attacks. There’s nothing really new about them. It’s just a very sad comment that instead of responding to these concerns, which are not Amnesty’s concerns alone, but virtually every UN body -- every other independent human rights organization around the world has raised the same charges. So you have to attack the entire body of human rights experts around the globe if you’re the United States, because we're all saying the same thing....

We're not only concerned about what is happening abroad, but we’re also concerned about the violations of human rights here in the United States. We have documented numerous cases where people are being ill-treated in prisons in the United States. And, in fact, there’s a link between, for example, what happens in maximum-security prisons inside the United States and the kinds of treatments that we have seen at Abu Ghraib or in Guantanamo. So it’s very important that the commitment to human rights means a commitment to human rights everywhere, not only abroad, but here at home, as well.